Samuel West has narrated 53 audiobooks on Listento.it by 42 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 947 ratings. The most-rated is The Vortex.
The Final Cut
Summary
Francis Urquhart’s eventful career as Prime Minister comes to a spectacular end in the final volume in the Francis Urquhart trilogy - now reissued in audio. He schemed his way to power in House of Cards and had a memorable battle of wills with the new king in To Play the King. Now Francis Urquhart is about to take his place in the record books as the longest serving Prime Minister this century. Yet it seems the public is tiring of him at last, and the movement to force him from power is growing. But Urquhart is not yet ready to be driven from office. If the public demand new blood, that is precisely what he will give them.... Francis Urquhart goes out in a blaze of glory in this final volume in the irresistible story of the most memorable politician of the decade.
©2018 Michael Dobbs (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Great Speeches in History
Summary
From Socrates to Charles I, Danton to Lincoln - here are some of history's most significant figures with their most important speeches. Fighting for justice, for freedom of speech, and sometimes even for their own lives, these orators demonstrate the finest resources of language in the service of the most dramatic issues of their day. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©1996 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. (P)1996 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.
Just So Stories
Summary
Samuel West reads ten of Rudyard Kipling’s famous tales, as broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
"How the Whale Got His Throat", "How the Leopard Got His Spots", "The Beginning of the Armadillos", "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin", "The Cat That Walked By Himself", "How the Camel Got His Hump", "The Crab That Played With The Sea", "The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo", "The Butterfly That Stamped", "The Elephant’s Child".
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of Just So Science, these charming tales are sure to delight listeners of all ages.
©2015 BBC Worldwide Ltd (P)2015 BBC Worldwide Ltd
Peter Pan
Summary
"I'm youth, I'm joy...I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg." The story of the little boy who refused to grow up has captured the imagination of generations of children (and the adults they grew into) since its publication in 1904. Peter Pan flies in through the bedroom window one night and teaches Wendy, John, and Michael to fly. He lures them away from their home and parents and takes them away to endless adventures in the magical Neverland, where they meet the wicked Captain Hook and a host of other characters. Funny, charming, touching, and incisively observant as to the ways of children and adults, Peter Pan is an unforgettable story. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©1996 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd. (P)1996 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.
Poems to Live Your Life By
Summary
In Poems to Live Your Life By, Chris Riddell, political cartoonist for the Observer, has selected his very favourite classic and modern poems about life, death and everything in between. This wonderful audio edition is read by British actor Sam West, who has notably starred in iconic films such as Notting Hill and Darkest Hour, and has a run time of approximately 90 minutes. It includes 46 poems and is divided into sections covering musings, youth, family, love, imaginings, nature, war and endings. Chris' wonderful anthology features famous poems, old and new, and a few surprises. Classic verses from William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, W. B. Yeats and Christina Rossetti sit alongside poems from Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Carol Ann Duffy, Neil Gaiman and Roger McGough to create the ultimate collection brought to life by West's exquisite readings. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio on our Desktop Site.
©2018 Chris Riddell (P)2018 Macmillan Digital Audio
To Play the King
Summary
Newly elected Prime Minister Francis Urquhart takes on the new King in the controversial number one best-selling second volume in the Francis Urquhart trilogy - now reissued in audio. After scheming his way to power in House of Cards, Francis Urquhart made a triumphant return in To Play the King - a Sunday Times number one best-seller that became a BBC TV series, with Ian Richardson resuming his award-winning role as Francis Urquhart, and a hugely successful Netflix series. Its highly controversial and uncannily topical storyline - in which the role of the monarchy in modern Britain comes under scrutiny as Prime Minister Francis Urquhart threatens to expose Royal secrets when his plans are blocked by the idealistic new King - coincided with a huge increase in public interest in the future of the Royal Family following a series of Royal scandals.
©2013 Michael Dobbs (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Henrik Ibsen
Summary
Often described as ‘the father of realism’, Henrik Ibsen was a pioneer of modernist drama. He influenced playwrights as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Included in this collection are adaptations of his tragicomic masterpiece The Wild Duck, his complex and compelling play Rosmersholm, the epic drama Brand and the tragedy John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is relocated to 1879 India in Tanika Gupta’s Audio Drama Award-winning dramatisation, while the provocative and scandalous Ghosts is adapted by Richard Eyre, with the cast of his Olivier Award-winning Almeida Theatre production. Also featured are vibrant dramatisations of Hedda Gabler, whose desperate heroine is trapped in a suffocating marriage; The Lady from the Sea, about a woman torn between security and passion; and An Enemy of the People, in which a whistleblower reveals an inconvenient truth and is vilified for it. The casts of these stunning dramas include David Threlfall, Nicholas Farrell, Helen Baxendale, Indira Varma, Lesley Manville and Harriet Walter.
©2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2020 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd
No Night Is Too Long
Summary
Tim Cornish thought he'd gotten away with murder. For months after he'd killed his lover off the Alaskan coast, there hadn't been a word. But then the letters started to arrive. It seems that someone knows what Tim has done.... This compelling thriller delivers such a dark picture of romantic love that murder seems its natural mate. Frightening, suspenseful, and deeply unsettling, No Night Is Too Long is a modern crime masterpiece and will be enjoyed by readers of P. D. James and Ian Rankin. Barbara Vine is the pen name of Ruth Rendell. Ruth has published 14 novels under the Vine name, two of which, Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet, won the prestigious Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award.
©1994 Barbara Vine (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Wench Is Dead
Summary
That night he dreamed in Technicolor. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings. And in Morse's muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks.... The body of Joanna Franks was found at Duke's Cut on the Oxford Canal at about 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 22nd June 1859. At around 10:15 a.m. on a Saturday morning in 1989, the body of Chief Inspector Morse - though very much alive - was removed to Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. Treatment for a perforated ulcer was later pronounced successful. As Morse begins his recovery, he comes across an account of the investigation and the trial that followed Joanna Franks' death...and becomes convinced that the two men hanged for her murder were innocent....
©2017 Colin Dexter (P)2017 Macmillan Digital Audio
Death Is Now My Neighbour
Summary
As he drove his chief down to Kidlington, Lewis returned the conversation to where it had begun. 'You haven't told me what you think about this fellow Owens - the dead woman's next-door neighbour.' 'Death is always the next-door neighbour,' said Morse sombrely. The murder of a young woman... A cryptic 17th-century love poem... And a photograph of a mystery grey-haired man... More than enough to set Chief Inspector E. Morse on the trail of a killer. And it's a trail that leads him to Lonsdale College, where the contest between Julian Storrs and Dr Denis Cornford for the coveted position of Master is hotting up. But then Morse faces a greater, far more personal crisis....
©2017 Colin Dexter (P)2017 Macmillan Digital Audio
Unfinished Tales
Summary
JRR Tolkien’s legacy of short stories which inhabit the realm of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, on audio for the first time. Unfinished Tales is a collection of narratives ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring and provides those who have read The Lord of the Rings with a whole collection of background and new stories from the 20th century’s most acclaimed popular author. The book concentrates on the realm of Middle-earth and comprises such elements as Gandalf’s lively account of how it was that he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End, the emergence of the sea-god Ulmo before the eyes of Tuor on the coast of Beleriand and an exact description of the military organisation of the Riders of Rohan. Unfinished Tales also contains the only story about the long ages of Numenor before its downfall and all that is known about such matters as the Five Wizards, the Palantiri and the legend of Amroth. The tales were collated and edited by JRR Tolkien’s son and literary heir, Christopher Tolkien, who provides a short commentary on each story, helping the reader to fill in the gaps and put each story into the context of the rest of his father’s writings.
©2021 J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Blood, Sex and Money
Summary
Glenda Jackson stars in this award-winning BBC Radio series, inspired by literature's greatest ever whistleblower, Émile Zola, and his epic saga of the Rougon-Macquart family. First published between 1870 and 1893, Émile Zola’s 20-book cycle chronicling four generations of the Rougon-Macquarts, was a shocking exposé of the decadence, degradation, and moral decay of 19th-century France. It included some of his greatest novels, among them his masterpiece, Germinal. These innovative, ambitious dramas, first broadcast on Radio 4 over 24 hours in 2015-16, is a radical reimagining of Zola’s classic series, introducing us to 104-year-old matriarch, Dide, imprisoned in an asylum in southern France. Trapped, but omniscient, she broods over her ‘family of wolves’. As a young woman, she gave birth to two dynasties that exemplified French society. One legitimate – rich, powerful, obsessive and corrupt. The other illegitimate – poor, vulnerable, weak and depraved. In these three seasons, themed around blood, sex and money, we come to know the members of her extended family intimately – the good, the bad and the misguided. As we follow their highs and lows, we are taken deep into the heart of France’s ‘Second Empire’, and drawn into the tragic, farcical reign of Napoleon III, as it marches forward towards a modern, industrialised society. This groundbreaking series won Best Drama at the BBC Radio and Music Awards 2016, and Best Adaptation at the BBC Audio Drama Awards 2017, and boasts a star cast including Robert Lindsay, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Holliday Grainger, Samuel West, Anna Maxwell Martin, Paul McGann, Georgina Campbell, Jack Lowden and Alison Steadman. Also included is a 30-minute bonus programme, The Life and Work of Émile Zola, in which Glenda Jackson travels to Paris to discover how Zola’s experience and the physical and cultural landscape in which he lived influenced his great novels. Written by Émile Zola Dramatised by Dan Rebellato, Oliver Emanuel, Martin Jameson and Lavinia Murray Produced and directed by Pauline Harris, Polly Thomas, Kirsty Williams, Nadia Molinari and Gary Brown Executive Producer: Melanie Harris Series Producer: Susan Roberts Sound designer: Eloise Whitmore
©2019 BBC Worldwide Ltd (P)2019 BBC Worldwide Ltd
The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy
Summary
From a noted Cambridge zoologist, a wildly fun and scientifically sound exploration of what alien life must be like, using universal laws that govern life on Earth and in space. Scientists are confident that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Yet rather than taking a realistic approach to what aliens might be like, we imagine that life on other planets is the stuff of science fiction. The time has come to abandon our fantasies of space invaders and movie monsters and place our expectations on solid scientific footing. But short of aliens landing in New York City, how do we know what they are like? Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin's theory of evolution - which applies throughout the universe - Cambridge zoologist Dr. Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like: how these creatures will move, socialize, and communicate. For example, by observing fish whose electrical pulses indicate social status, we can see that other planets might allow for communication by electricity. As there was evolutionary pressure to wriggle along a sea floor, Earthling animals tend to have left/right symmetry; on planets where creatures evolved in midair or in soupy tar, they might be lacking any symmetry at all. Might there be an alien planet with supersonic animals? A moon where creatures have a language composed of smells? Will aliens scream with fear, act honestly, or have technology? The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy answers these questions using the latest science to tell the story of how life really works, on Earth and in space.
©2021 Arik Kershenbaum (P)2021 Penguin Audio